2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

For some faculty, it is an ongoing challenge to design assignments and course policies that motivate students to focus on the learning that can come from overcoming challenges. For many students, when the stakes are too high or their time is too strained, productive activities are bypassed for strategies that more quickly get to an answer without necessarily exercising critical thinking skills. A variety of approaches have been taken to encourage students to productively struggle on formative assessments and then reflect on their results to further enhance learning [1], [2], [3]. These strategies often come with a tradeoff.
The purpose of this work is to share additional strategies where students have been given multiple opportunities to complete formative assignments with the hope of finding a balance where students feel motivated to put enough effort into the ‘productive struggle’ and problem solving to learn the material.
Specifically, this paper presents variations on an approach where students were given multiple opportunities to complete their lab assignments and weekly homework assignments. While the summative assessments in the class, like quizzes, midterms, and final exams were preserved as single-attempt assessments, the initial exposure to material included activities that allowed students to take multiple attempts at learning the material.
This work-in-progress paper shares the details of the structure of the assignments and initial results from applying these approaches in an Introduction to Programming for Engineers class at a two-year college.